cyrus-on-t-blog
A transman's account
Hi. My name is Cyrus, and I've been sober for-- Oh wait. I've been on testosterone since 10/08/2018, and I'm gonna share my medical journey.
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The T-Shot
Trigger warning for mentions of needles.
The gel worked fine, but I swapped to the injection because the gel had some inconveniences. The injection works well for me, and I am, for the most part, able to do it myself.
It is still an injection and pretty unnerving, and testosterone is a thick serum, so it burns like hell. The needle also has to be thicker (I think the needle I use is 20 gauge, which is the size of your average earring post). That sucks.
But I only have to do it once a week, and that is much easier for me than a gel every day.
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Misadventures with the T-Shot
Trigger warning for blood and needles. No images.
Last Friday, not yesterday, but the week before, I tried to give myself my shot. The needle dulls after you poke yourself the first time, and I barely touched to my skin, but that was enough. I got distracted and aborted the first shot. The rest of the shot hurt far more than normal, and when I pulled the needle out, I started bleeding a lot for just a shot.
I got queasy, had to get help from a friend to stop it since I was so caught off guard by my own blood just going all over the place (it stayed on the top of my thigh, but there was enough to be distressing). At the end, I had a bruise.
The next time I did the shot, I went to my doctor’s office (since I was there for a sick visit) and had the nurse do it.
I’d never been concerned by my own blood, but I suppose since I was the one who caused the bleeding and not an accident or a cat, it registered differently in my brain.
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Body Changes: Fordyce spots
This one ventures in to genital medical territory, so it’ll be under a cut.
Fordyce spots, the white cyst like looking things, can also appear on your labia, your penis, and your lips. They appear elsewhere, but these are the most common spots.
As a trans masculine person, I cannot speak from experience regarding a penis.
When I first started my transition, I was concerned about the strange bumps I felt around my labia while showering. If you have no reason to think otherwise, no STDs or other existing medical condition, those bumps are likely just more fordyce spots.
For this post, I will link the wikipedia article. Be warned there is an erect penis as the spots on a penis, evidently, don’t really manifest unless the penis is erect.
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Unexpected Body Changes
I had been on testosterone for nine and a half months when I saw these... little white dots on the softer parts of my lips. These are harmless. They’re called “Fordyce spots,” which are sebaceous glands. Oil glands. They’re not acne. Don’t pick at them.
Mine, on my lips, are about the size of pin heads. Having only ever seen cancer sores on my lips, I was concerned.
If you are like me, images of skin tends to squick you out. And OF COURSE if you google it, you’ll get the worst possible images.
Also, if you google it, be aware that you will get a bunch of pictures of the spots on genitalia as they tend to be most prominent on tender skin where there is no hair.
They become more prominent during puberty or other hormonal changes. HRT is basically second puberty, so I would expect them. Though, in a testosterone based transition, I like to call it “Man-O-Pause”.
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On Gel
The doctor I saw to start on T and move over to as GP in general is perhaps the best doctor I have ever gone to. He is always late to the exam room, but he’s spent upwards of an hour asking me questions and following up on health issues I’d forgotten about.
On my very first appointment with him, I was prescribed my HRT.
I started on androgel. T gel, not to be confused with T/gel which is a shampoo and entirely unrelated, is as effective as the shot. Androgel came in a pump bottle. I had no real complaints about it. It worked. It would leave a white scaley residue like I had horribly dry skin if I let too much of it goop in one spot, but it worked.
Once it’s dry, yes, other people can touch your arm. Just don’t... lick it. I would still avoid holding your cat on your arms where their fur might touch.
My doctor likes to take the medical transition more slowly than other doctors. At about six months in my voice started to drop.
Androgel decided to charge more for their bottle, so I was put on another gel, Testim. Testim is. It comes in little tubes, and each tube is a dose. It’s easier to see how much you have left if you don’t keep track. Testim also didn’t leave a white residue, but... It was sticky. I would be peeling my under shirts off of my shoulders and arms.
In the end, I swapped from the gel to the injection (which has it’s own quirks) not because the gel didn’t work but because of convenience. You have to apply the gel every day. It’s easier to control the dosage, but I still found it annoying enough to swap to the injection.
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I was plumb fuck lucky.
I had seen the same psychiatrist for fifteen years. This woman had seen me as a child struggling with ADHD and as an adult struggling with the resulting mood disorder. ADHD is largely a mood disorder, and it tends to manifest as depression in adulthood. Especially when you’ve stopped taking the ADHD medication and are no longer “as smart” as you once perceived yourself.
Side note: that’s because you don’t know how your brain works without the drug. It took about seven years for me to learn how my brain worked again.
I felt comfortable with this doctor, and after a year of thinking of mentioning it to her, I finally told her I wanted to see a gender therapist. ... And she had the name of one ready. Not for me. She didn’t know I wanted to transition before that appointment, but she had other patients who had seen this therapist. And I was just plumb fuck lucky that the psychiatrist I’d seen my entire life was affirming. Even if she didn’t know much about.
When I did end up telling her I planned to go on testosterone, her only concern was my previously noted vague yet menacing mood disorder, and that we’d have to keep an eye on it.
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I started working a shitty job in the beginning of 2016. It was terrible. It was stressful. It was hard on my body. One of my coworkers, who I thought was this kinda worrisome cis guy, and I were closing up for the night. This coworker was actually a year or two younger than me, and we were both new hires. I learned that this coworker was a closeted trans woman, and she was the first trans person I knew that... it really clicked with me.
Before, my classmate had been struggling with it. She’d been told to bury it and get rid of it, and that nearly killed her.
This coworker, while still very closeted and unable to do anything about it without risking her job and her family’s welfare, was still more open about it with me than any one I’d met before. I realized that... I wanted to transition too.
We both eventually left that garbage job, and while I was still a disaster, I didn’t keep in touch.
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When I was younger, before puberty, I knew I desperately did not want boobs. I didn’t want people sexualizing me. I didn’t want babies. I didn’t want to wear bras. I didn’t want to go through puberty.
Not every transperson is the same, and not every transmasculine person felt as I did. A large part of that is that I was and still am, aromantic and asexual.
Of course, most little girls didn’t hope that they would get breast cancer so that they could have a mastectomy. Learning about top surgery was a massive relief to me. Breast reduction, as had been mentioned to little me, was not appealing.
Additionally, little me hated shaving. I have and had eczema. Extra time in the shower was awful. I would get a rash from drying out. That led to my mother policing my body, telling me to shave, no woman let her underarms get hairy, that small unnoticeable dark patch of hair on my chest needed to be waxed. My non-existent mustache needed to be waxed, and my eyebrows needed to be groomed. All of these hurt, and not being particularly feminine to begin with, I resented my mother for it.
Side note: My mother was harassed both by her family and complete strangers growing up that she was too tomboyish and accused of being a lesbian. She went through a lot of shit, and she wanted to make sure that didn’t happen to me.
I actually had a friend in high school who was mtf, though at the time she was seeing a therapist who’s idea of treating her was... trying to force her into lying to herself and remaining as a man. It still never occurred to me, even after she transitioned, that I could transition and maybe that’s something I’d want to do.
Down the road, I made several friends online, one of whom was nonbinary and used they/them pronouns. I knew them for a few years before thinking that I wanted to do that too, but I was afraid that the friend group would think I was just trying to be unique. Or copying that friend.
When you’re pre-transitioning or even aware that you are trans, you have a bunch of hang ups you don’t even realize are related to it. I was also going through some serious issues with my mental illness and hadn’t found medication that quite worked. I’d dropped out of college, I’d moved home to upset parents, gained 100 pounds, and was a disaster.
Eventually, I lost those friends as I couldn’t regain control of myself. In a way, that freed me. With a new group of people, as I eventually found and created, I could be someone new. I started using my desired pronouns. After almost a year of a shitty job, I started looking into transitioning.
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So I want to keep this casual and lazy. More of a public diary for other trans guys going through their thing.
My name is Cyrus. I was born in 1993, and started to have the inklings that I was nonbinary in about 2014-2015. I knew growing up that gender didn’t really matter to me. I would have been just as happy as a boy as I was a little girl. But as I grew older, that became less and less true.
In late 2017 I started looking for a therapist to help with gender, and in 2018 I found a good gender affirming therapist. It was then I first experienced gender euphoria. Being affirmed brought me ridiculous amounts of joy, and later that year I started my medical journey.
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